52nd Venice International Art Biennale

photograph courtesy La Biennale

Sunday 10^th June – Golden Lion Prize – Malick Sidibe. The prestigious Golden Lion prize for lifetime achievement of the 52^nd International Art Biennale went to Malian photographer, Malick Sidibe, he is also the first African and the first photographer to receive the prize. “Operating primarily from a small studio on one of the busiest streets of central Bamako, the capital of Mali, Sibide has been the signal portraitist of his city and nation and the intimate observer of the Malian musical scene. Like August Sander, the great German photographer, he has preserved the likenesses of countless individuals while in the process recording the face of the rapidly changing society they, as citizens, have collectively brought into being.” The Biennale director Robert Storr explains. “For the Biennale Sibide joined forces with the organizers of the project L’Afrique Chante Contre le SIDA to take pictures of contestants in a countrywide competition for singers and song writers who composed and performed in Mali’s various languages designed to provide information about the AIDS disease, its preventions and its treatment. “No African has done more to enhance photography’s stature." Storr concludes.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Sunday 10^th June – Palazzo Fortuny – Artempo. Artempo, this beautiful exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny, until October 7^th, investigates the relation between art and time bringing together different centuries and artistic languages. Ranging from rare and precious archaeological material to contemporary works of installation art, the over three hundred pieces in the exhibition come mainly from Axel Verwoordt’s eclectic collections, from Venice’s museums and other important public and private collections throughout the world. The artists represented number over eighty and including works by; Francis Bacon, Albert Burri, Loris Cecchini, Berlinde De Bruycke, El Anatsui, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti, Anish Kapoor, Pablo Picasso, James Turrell and Andy Warhol. A good example is the white room where an anonymous Buddha from thirteenth century China sits in front of Roman Opalka’s white paintings and “meditates”.

A detail. An anonymous ancient Dvaravati Buddha bust from Thailand stands next to Anish Kapoor’s S-Curve, 2006 sculpture.

Seen at the Artempo exhibition in Palazzo Fortuny. Eclectic artist, Laura Panno sits and chats with maestro sculptor, Arnaldo Pomodoro. One of Laura’s favorite artists in this Biennale is El Anatsui, whose tapestries, made recycled materials, hang outside the palazzo, as well as, in the Arsenale. Whereas, Pomodoro thinks Giuseppe Penone should win the Golden Lion prize, as he is truly worthy of it.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Sunday 10^th June – Palazzo Benzon: Jan Fabre – Anthropology of a Planet. Organized by the GAMeC (Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea di Bergamo) and curated by Giacinto Pietrantonio the Jan Fabre extended personal exhibition, Anthropology of a Planet, until September 23^rd. is awesome. The display shows the Flemish artist’s research in its multiplicity, ranging from sculptures to movies, from drawings to installations. The imposing piece, I Spit On My Tomb, 2007, which takes up the whole salone on the piano nobile, consists of 250 gravestones of black and grey granite on which the names of living and extinct insects are engraved in Flemish with the date of birth or birth and death of artists, philosophers, musicians, writers, scientists, written beneath them.

A Detail: The man writing on Water, 2006. A sculpture made up of seven bronze bathtubs, where there is a sculpture-portrait of the artist seated in the second one, in the process of writing on the water with his finger. This act is also referred to in the poetry of the nineteenth-century Flemish poet Guido Gezelle “Het Schrijverke”, in which the insect schrijverke, a water dragonfly, writes God’s name on the water. Here, writing on the water in gilded bronze basins, in the container made of the symbolic color of gold, metal of spirituality and royalty, color of light that shines gloriously, expresses a will to survive towards the absolute and the eternity. That, in addition to being a biographical element, because Fabre has a nearly amphibious habit of writing and drawing at night while soaking in water in a bathtub, which for the artist is a coffin as recipient for the dead…

Saturday 9^th June – Palazzo Papadopoli: Ukrainian Pavilion – A Poem About and Inland Sea. The works exhibited in the Ukrainian Pavilion were created by a group of artists from Ukraine and other countries. The exhibition plans on raising questions such as the important Ukrainian film director, Alexander Dovzhenko did in the script for Poem about and Inland Sea and throughout his career – what is it to be Ukrainian?
The artists are: Serhiy Bartkov, Dzine, Alexander Hnilitsky/Lesia Zaiats, Boris Mikhailov, Juergen Teller, Mark Titchner, Sam Taylor-Wood.

Sam Taylor-Wood – That White Rush. Superficially minimalist in style, Sam Taylor-Wood’s works have more to do with time-actions, creating active pieces that often, but not always, last for a limited amount of time. In her newest video works she examines the theoretical zone between flat surfaces of both classical painting and active video. In the work That White Rush, DVD, 2007, based on a W.B. Yeats’ poem, a beautiful swan slowly dissolves on top of a girl as she watches the long progression.

Serhiy Bratkov – Hell Land and Hell Operator – Light Box, 2007. For the Biennale, Bartkov has created a series of new portrait works about Ukrainians at work in a steel mill. These ruff and brutal light-box installations, with chemical drums and slabs of steel with video, are installed in the ornate rooms of the Palazzo and use the architecture of the building to continue his interest in new modes of large-scale photography. Along side the light-boxes, is a video documenting the flow of molten steel before it is shaped and formed. Here, he creates a tension between the industrial might and power of the event and the blatant sexual references that that exist in the real world.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Saturday 9^th June – Galleria Marina Barovier: Laura de Santillana – Khadi. Another exhibition not to be missed is Laura de Santillana’s sculpture exhibition, entitled Khadi, at the Galleria Marina Barovier, until September 30^th. The only proof of mystery is the unique clarity of the object inside which a sprit momentarily inhabited. These words by Cristina Campo seem to have been written for Laura’s work. Fragments, or complete sets of forms, shine in the vitreous liquidity of glass-like metallic spines, rippled copper weaves, bronze and brass remnants resembling archeological textures belonging to regal cloaks, sumptuous and delicate remains of vestments float and dance.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Saturday 9^th June – Palazzo Querini Stampalia Onlus – Croatian Pavilion – Ivana Franke. The Coratian Pavilion is situated on the ground floor of the Palazzo Querini Stampalia Onlus, restructured in the 1960’s by renowned Italian architect, Carlo Scarpa. I loved this installation; I thought it was very elegant and pleasing to the eye. Ivana Franke’s site specific installation comprises of light, sound and objects aiming to emphasize fragile and subtle interpretation of three Venetian trademarks: canals, architecture and interior gardens, interlocking within Carlo Scarpa’s masterpiece. Franke’s vision includes all of the Area Scarpa’s characteristics, from visual and spatial interaction of water, stone and grass, to more poetic rendering of uncontrollable acqua alta(above) sweeping over the defined stonework artistry toward the lush greenery of the courtyard.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Friday 8^th – Palazzo Grassi: Seen at the Gucci – L’Uomo Vogue Party. Bi-continental PR, Karla Otto arrives at Palazzo Grassi by private motor boat for the Gucci, L’Uomo Vogue Party with Viktor and Rolf. The Dutch fashion designers were looking forward to viewing the German and Canadian Pavilions at the Biennale.

Seen at Palazzo Grassi at the Gucci – L’Uomo Vogue Party. Stella Keseava, wife of the Russian tobacco tycoon, Igor Kesaeva. Besides being a patron of contemporary art in Moscow she also started the Stella Art Foundation. Stella’s favorite exhibition at the Biennale was the Joseph Kosuth installation on the Island of San Lazzaro, see below.

Seen arriving at Palazzo Grassi for the Gucci - L’Uomo Vogue Party. Famous Italian singer, Ornella Vanoni. She is wearing a beautiful pleated organza iridescent wrap by Gualti.

Seen outside Palazzo Grassi: Visionaire’s Giorgio Pace and jewelry designer, Antonia Miletto waiting for the last vaporetto, they are looking at the special Biennale issue of L’Uomo Vogue. Antonia has just opened a small jewelry boutique near Palazzo Grassi in the calle Salizzada Malipiero, note her turquoise earings.

Friday 8^th June – Giardini: Venice Pavilion – Tribute to Emilio Vedova. The Venice Pavilion reopened with a great exhibition, a tribute to the late Emilio Vedova. German artist, Georg Baselitz painted a series of black and white paintings exhibited around a superb single round gigantic sculpture painting by the Italian abstract painter, Emilio Vedova, entitled, Senza Titolo (als ob) it represents the expressive maturity of the artist’s language and the Golden Lion (1997) to his career.

Friday 8^th June – Seen in the Giardini. Beautiful, Margherita Missoni, flew in from New York for a special guided and selected tour by her mother Angela during the Biennale. One of their favorite Pavilions was the British Pavilion. In fact, Angela Missoni gave a pre-Biennale party on their barge Timoteo for Emin. To view the party photos scroll down, down.

Friday 8^th June – Giardini: British Pavilion – Tracey Emin – Borrowed Light. Tracey Emin’s exhibition in the British Pavilion includes works specially made for the Biennale. Using a variety of media including embroidery, drawing, painting and neon, Emin’s uniquely intimate form of emotional realism shines through in Borrowed Light. From smudgy monoprints to lightly painted oils and watercolors, Emin interprets moments in her life with an astonishing urgency, much of it describing how it feels to be a body taken over by feeling; exhilarating, frightening, embarrassing confusing, disabling and empowering. Commenting on the exhibition, Emin said: “The chance to exhibit at the Venice Biennale is a great honor and has helped me to redefine what my work really means to me. Borrowed Light is my most feminine body of works so far, very sensual but at the same time it is graphically sharp. It is both pretty and hardcore. For me, as an artist, what’s important is to cover everything from the emotional to the literal, and sometimes that means I give myself a very hard time.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Friday 8^th June – Giardini: Italian Pavilion – Antonio Spanedda and Aurelio Gentile – Artista Confezionati, Performance. Antonio Spanedda and Aurelio Gentile, after ten years from their first exhibition propose to the public of the 52^nd Venice Biennale the performance, Manufactured Artists. The event was sponsored by the Brera Aacademy of Fine Arts. They were looking at veteran artist, Louise Bourgeois’s untitled series of seventy-four drawings.

A detail: one of Louise Bourgeois’s seventy-four untitled drawings, 2005.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Friday 8^th June – Seen outside the giardini. Super designer, William Sawaya and Paolo Moroni of Sawaya and Moroni fame. Their favorite Pavilion was the Russian Pavilion

Friday 8^th June – Giardini: Russian Pavilion - AES+F – Last Riot. Last Riot is a video installation by Andrey Bartenev, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes or AES+F. In a fantasy landscape where time is suspended, past epochs exist alongside future ones, and creation mingles with destruction - is populated by glamorous, androgynous teenagers. To the music of Wagner, these youths struggle in a war against themselves, a war without difference between aggressor and victim, male and female, good and bad, fate and free will. The heroes of this cyber-epic are doomed to eternal battle. It is a battle without blood or pain, contact without contact. Each generation creates its own tale of apocalypse in music, painting and other forms of art. Last Riot is a post-apocalyptic vision that has come to replace them.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Friday 8th June - Seen between the Arsenale and the Giardini. Italian painter and sculptor, Lucio del Pezzo. Del Pezzo’s favorite artists in the Biennale are the Kabakovs. “Their work is a fantastic project on Russian history.” He told me.

photograph courtesy La Biennale

Friday 8^th June – Arsenale: Think with the Senses – Feel with the mind. Art in the Present Tense – Ilya and Emilia Kabakov - Manas. Russian artists based in New York, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s installation entitled Manas consists of a series of models of mountains observatories ostensibly designed to collect cosmic energy, special dreams, views of alien civilizations, etc. Like most of the Kabakovs’ sculptural tableaux, the work has a pleasing tone of Russian absurdist literature. Writes Walter Robinson for Artnet.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Friday 8^th June - Seen at the Sperone Westwater dinner at Ca Rezzonico in honor of Guillermo Kuitca. Argentinan artist, Guillermo Kuitca (right) stops on his way into dinner to pose with Robert Storr and his family. Kuitca not only represents Argentina in the Argentian Pavilion but also participates in the Arsenale exhibiton curated by Robert Storr. Storr is the first director from the United States in more than one hundred years of the Biennale exhibition. The theme this year is Think with the Senses – Feel with the mind. Art in the Present Tense. The exhibition presents more than one hundred artists, from all over the world with many site-specific works and new productions created for this particular exhibition with the collaboration of the Biennale di Venezia.

Friday 8^th June – Arsenale: Think with the Senses – Feel with the mind. Art in the Present Tense – Guillermo Kuitca. Guillermo Kuitca’s diaries. Shown above one of the walls of the thirty-eight canvases from the artist’s “Diarios” series, which began in 1994 and continue to the present.

A detail; of one of the Kuitca Diarios, mixed media on canvas, diameter:120cm, depth: 4cm.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Friday 8^th June - Seen at the Giardini, Empress Farah Pahlavi. Farah Diba has always been interested in art; she is a promoter of art and women emancipation. Her favorite artist in the Biennale is El Anatsui.

Friday 8^th June – Arsenale: Think with the Senses – Feel with the mind. Art in the Present Tense – El Anatsui. El Anatsui is one of Africa’s foremost contemporary artists of his generation. His gigantic wall hangings are made from thousands of pieces of re-cycled materials. Anatsui weaves the debris of consumer excess into monumental tapestries in the tradition of West African textiles, subverting notions of tradition and modernity and prompting us to re-examine what makes up the fabric of our lives.

A Detail: of El Anatsui tapestry, entitled Ducasa I made with discarded aluminum and copper Wire, stitching.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Friday 8^th June – Seen at the Arsenale. Armani’s U.K. ambassador Lady Helen Taylor was doing the rounds with her husband, art dealer, Tim Taylor. Her favorite pavilions were, Great Britain, Canada and Russia.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Friday 8^th June – Arsenale: Italian Pavilion – Giuseppe Penone – Lymph Sculptures. The new Italian Pavilion reopens after eight years of absence with two very different artists, yet their basic purpose is the same: to create forms of art that are valid as a critical understanding of existence, of all that forms part of our experience. Curator Ida Gianelli explains her choice “Giusppe Penone has forty years’ work behind him, with extensive experience of the avant-garde, first in the Arte Povera movement and then while following out his own individual paths. Vezzoli is a thirty-five-year-old artist who has rapidly won an international reputation without leaving his country to live elsewhere.

Giuseppe Penone’s Lymph Sculptures is an installation developed for this venue, consisting of very large wood and marble sculptures as well as drawings. Penone describes it thus: “Spaces covered by hands, spaces emptied by hands. The sculpture space is filled with lymph. The hand flux flows on the tree rind, revealing the form of wood and the veins of marble.”

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Friday 8^th June – Arsenale: Italian Pavilion – Francesco Vezzoli - Democrazy. Ida Gianelli, the curator of the Italian Pavilion writes. “Vezzoli’s project conceived for the Italian Pavilion enlarges the analysis of contemporary system of communication to include the great spectacle of politics, and in particular the veritable construction of a character and a world view in the form of electoral propaganda. Entitled Democrazy, the video installation, draws on the forthcoming United States presidential elections for 2008. It presents two fictitious politicians, the result of collaboration between the artist and two important groups of ‘media advisors’, professional experts in American politics. The candidates, Patricia Hill and Patrick Hill, interpreted by famous personalities, true media stars, in a mere sixty seconds debate their different political visions and in doing so reveal how the strategies of communication deprive words of any real meaning and transform everything into a great media show.”

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Thursday 7^th June - Marie and Brandino Brandolini’s party for Lilli Doriguzzi. Seen at Marie and Brandino Brandolini’s party for Lilli Doriguzzi, French actress, Ariel Dombasle and philosopher, Bernard-Henri Levy. BHL is one of the stars of Francesco Vezzoli’s video Democrazy shown in the new Italian Pavilion at the Arsenale. In a triumph of pure spectacle, Democrazy sets Sharon Stone against Bernard-Henri Levy, celebrities whose names and faces are part of the collective imagination. In Political Advertisement for the Election of Bernard-Henri Levy as Patrick Hill, Levy takes on the role of the candidate supported by a network of international relationships, someone skilled at forming alliances with political, religious and cultural figures. In Political Advertisement for the Election of Sharon Stone as Patricia Hill, the other video that makes up the installation, Stone plays the well-to-do candidate, possibly representing powerful forces, demagogically poised to seek direct contact with the public on the occasion of her electoral campaign.

Seen at Marie and Brandino Brandolini’s party for Lilli Doriguzzi, Mario Testino toasts his host and hostess Marie and Brandino Brandolini d’Adda with Marie’s glasses designed for lagunaB and filled with Caipirinhas.

The entrance of the Brandolini’s apartment was transformed for the evening into an art gallery showing the works of Lilli Doriguzzi. The exhibition was entitled Passing By.

Seen at Marie and Brandino Brandolini’s party for Lilli Doriguzzi, Simona Gandolfi and her “mother-in-law” Ira Von Fustenberg.

Seen at Marie and Brandino Brandolini’s party for Lilli Doriguzzi, Rolf and Maryam Sachs. Rolf Sachs is an “infamous” minimalist designer and his work covers furniture, interiors and architecture. Together with his wife, Maryam they produced a beautiful picture book, entitled The Wild Emperor where a stationary camera, over a period of a year captured, every 10.5 minutes, the Wild Kaiser range of mountains outside their house Austria.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

photograph courtesy Haunch of Venison

Thursday 7^th June – Opening San Gallo Church; Bill Viola – Ocean Without a Shore. Bill Viola's major new work was presented at the Biennale, it is entitled Ocean Without a Shore, 2007 (until November 24^th), the three-screen High Definition video and sound installation was inspired by it’s setting – the 15^th century church of San Gallo. Ocean Without a Shore presents a cyclical progression of images that describes a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death. Located near the Piazza San Marco the church was formerly a private chapel, and Viola directly incorporates the internal architecture into his piece, using the three existing stone altars as video screens. The video sequence describes the human form as it gradually coalesces from within a dark field and slowly comes into view, moving from obscurity into the light. As the figure approaches, it becomes more solid and tangible until it breaks through an invisible threshold and passes into the physical world. The crossing of the threshold is an intense moment of infinite feeling and acute physical awareness.

Seen at the Opening: Bill Viola and Kira Perov. Of the work Viola states “It is about the presence of the dead in our lives. The three stone altars in San Gallo become transparent surfaces for the manifestation of images of the dead attempting to re-enter our world."

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Thursday 7^th June – Museo Correr: Opening Enzo Cucchi Exhibition. With this large retrospective show, until October 7^th, at the Museo Correr in Piazza San Marco, the Musei Civici Veneziani celebrates the work of Enzo Cucchi. Cucchi is one of the most significant contemporary Italian artists. The carefully designed exhibition contains a selection of works and cycles of paintings produced in the period from the late 1970s to the present day. Over one hundred paintings and drawings come from important museums from all over the world. Charting the full range of Enzo Cucchi’s work from the period when he first made his appearance on the international art stage, they reveal the extraordinary variety and richness of his art.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Thursday 7^th June – I Giardini: at the American Pavilion – Felix Gonzalez-Torres – America. The day started sunny, so, no need to take one of the two raincoats or one of the four umbrellas from the apartment. Around midday, it poured and poured and it was so uncomfortable I was wet through and covered in mud that I went home. This was the first Biennale opening that I remember, over the past twenty years or so, that it rained. The Two Circular Pools of Water installation by Felix Gonzalez-Torres outside the American Pavilion certainly didn’t need filling up. The late Cuban-born American citizen, Gonzalez-Torres is best known for his immensely generous yet rigorously conceptual art in the form of endlessly replenishable paper stacks, take-away candy spills (see below), light strings, beaded curtains and public billboards. With its minimalist refinement and quiet referentiality, his work treads a fine line between social commentary and personal disclosure, equivocating between two realms and obscuring the culturally-determined distinctions that separate them.

A detail: "Untitled" (Public Opinion), 1991: Black rod liquorice candies individually wrapped in cellophane, endless supply. Overall dimensions vary with installation. Ideal weight: 317.5 Kg. These were much enjoyed by the public especially around lunch time.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Thursday 7^th June – I Giardini: at the Korean Pavilion – Hyungkoo Lee – The Homo Species. Born and raised in Korea Hyungkoo Lee experienced ‘undersized Asian male complex’ while he was studying in the US. An Asian man having internalized the notion of male-superiority is doomed to be frustrated when he comes face-to-face with his ‘bigger and stronger’ Caucasian counterpart. Lee started to create The Objectuals Series in 1999 with humble materials such as water-filled PET bottles and shooter glasses to visually enlarge parts of his body. Especially the Helmets (see above), an on going series, combines his interest in physiognomy with optical instruments to exaggerate which might be called ‘self-satisfaction devices’, function as pseudo-medical instruments for plastic surgery, as well as psychological therapy to heal the artist’s mental complex.

The Animatus Series. Lee also extends his concerns to fictitious bodies of cartoon characters by inventing their fossil bones in quasi-archaeological way. He turns fiction into history through his anatomical studies and imaginations. The resulted Animatus Series, attributed to the tradition of Pop Art, can be seen as the epitome of simulation in providing plausible physical references and zoological nomenclatures to fictional characters. And the familiar Hollywood cartoon figures (i.e. Tom and Jerry) caught at a critical moment create dramatic scenes in the palaeontological fossil skeletons.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Thursday 7^th June – I Giardini: at the Canadian Pavilion – David Altmejd – The Index. The commission created by David Altmejd for the Biennale consists of two works, both toying with the Pavilion’s notable peculiarities of an aviary, imagining it as a shelter where birds can safely nest and feed. The Index chimes with this particular resonance, highlighting the architectural philosophy of planting a building organically in its natural settings; that of the Giardini Pubblici. The work is made up of various structures of wood steel and mirror glass, interconnected and assembled. They are inhabited by flocks of stuffed birds and squirrels, fabricated from materials at hand and fragmented bodies – half-human, half-avian – the whole richly ornamented with tree sections and quartz crystals. The Giant 2 is an imposing 5.5 meter sculpture, attended by all manner of stuffed and sculpted birds.

52nd Venice International Art Biennale

Thursday 7^th June – I Giardini: at the French Pavilion – Sophie Calle – Prenez Soin de Vous. “I received an email telling me it was over. I didn’t know how to answer. It was as if it wasn’t meant for me. It ended with the words: Take care of yourself. I took this recommendation literally. I asked a hundred and two women, chosen for their profession, to interpret the letter in their professional capacity. To analyze it, provide a commentary on it, act it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Squeeze it dry. Understand for me. Answer for me. It was a way to take the time to break up. At my own pace. A way to take care of myself.” Sophie Calle explains her beautiful exhibition.

Seen at the Chanel Dinner at Palazzo Polignac. French actress, Jeanne Moreau and French artist, Sophie Calle, were the guests of honor at the Chanel dinner, one of the official sponsors of the French Pavilion. The Palazzo was beautifully decorated by renowned Venetian architect and designer, Matteo Corvino, the stunning table center pieces were vases, candle holders and leaves of various sizes made from transparent Murano hand-blown glass that glowed in the candle light.

Contessanally tip: click on the photograph to enlarge.